How long will it be, do you think, until companies such as Amazon start delivering packages to you by drone?
If that prospect seems fantastical to you, you’re not alone. According to a survey published Tuesday by the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General, 57 percent of people are either neutral about it or think it’s a bad idea. Seventy-five percent of people think drone delivery is five years away at best; the rest think it will take even longer, if it happens at all.
There are some good reasons to think this timeline is accurate, which we will get into below. But the survey also reveals something else: Our skepticism of the technology may be a factor. That finding, which has been expressed in policy as a relatively slow approach to drone testing, helps shed important light on how technology adoption works more broadly. Here’s how.
No matter if you’re Amazon, Google or UPS, rolling out drone delivery would result in customers’ thinking less of your company, the data show.
If these numbers are right, it suggests that some of the biggest barriers to drone delivery may actually be perceptual as much as technological.
Even if a company said its drone delivery service were ready today, people would still reject it over a perception that it was not. But the thing is, many other countries are moving ahead with drone testing in a major way, while the United States only recently gave companies the green light to begin limited tests, according to Michael Drobac, a legal expert on drones at the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
“What appears to be science fiction or many years off is actually happening — just not here,” Drobac said.
This gap between public receptiveness to a technology on the one hand and the actual state of the technology on the other can be found in other industries, too.
Whether it’s drones, self-driving cars or even the Internet, the less someone has heard about a technology — and the more they think of it as new or unfamiliar — the less likely it is that they will view it positively. As a person learns about the technology, the more open to it that person becomes.
Read more of the original article at The Washington Post.
